In a microchip fabrication, different processing chambers are used for accomplishing various fabrication operations on a wafer. A processing chamber generally includes a wafer holder on which the wafer is placed. For example, the fabrication operations may be annealing, cleaning, chemical vapor deposition, oxidation, and nitridation.
The wafer may be broken into several pieces due to a higher stress in an annealing tool, and more particularly, in a milli-second (MS) or sub-MS annealing tool. When the wafer breakage occurs, the processing chamber will be contaminated by the pieces of the broken wafer. If the wafer breakage cannot be detected in time, the subsequent wafer will be transferred into the contaminated processing chamber and suffer from particle contamination, or even another wafer breakage issue may occur again. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a real-time wafer breakage detection method.